"Today you are you, that is truer than true. There is no one alive who is youer than you." -- Dr. Seuss

Have a favorite Dr. Seuss quote or passage from your childhood, or from reading to the children around you? To celebrate Read Across America, the Daily News is asking readers to send us their favorite quotes from Dr. Seuss books, or any other children's book for that matter. Love a book so much you can't just pick one sentence to quote? Tell us why you love the book. Send your submissions by 12 p.m., Thursday to LWilliams@naplesnews.com and be sure to include your first and last name and where you live. We'll pick submissions to print in Saturday's Neapolitan section.

Southwest Florida kids celebrate reading on Dr. Seuss' 105th birthday

His illustration was an illumination, and his rhyme — sublime.

The man known as Dr. Seuss would have been 105 Monday, which is also designated as Read Across America Day. To celebrate, children across Southwest Florida have kicked off a week celebrating Seuss and all things literary by diving headlong into reading.

"They're like sponges," said Terri Mancuso, a first-grade teacher, of her 6- and 7-year-olds. "The more stories, the better. They love hearing stories. They just love it."

In Mancuso's classroom at Spring Creek Elementary School, students munched on green eggs and biscuits, an homage to the much-loved and oft-quoted Dr. Seuss book, "Green Eggs and Ham."

Monday morning, Mancuso circulated around the room helping her students assemble construction paper red-and-white-striped hats a la "The Cat In the Hat." This gets them talking about the inspiration for their headgear.

Don munched on his biscuit, thinking about this, but his green eggs sat untouched.

"I'm saving them for last," he said with a knowing smile.

In his stovepipe red and white hat, Steve Alvarez, 7, read "The Cat in the Hat" with ease and confidence.

"I read this book and I have it at home," said Steve. "It has rhyming words and it's funny."

Mancuso said Steve and his classmates are at the perfect age to develop a love for reading — Read Across America Day is designed to instill that love in everyone, but particularly new readers.

"It's really important that they're read to and with," said Mancuso. "Not only are they learning to read, but it's quality time with mom and dad, and that's important."

Over the school's student-run newscast, students sang happy birthday to Theodor Geisel, known in literary life as Dr. Seuss, the force behind a collection of books credited with bringing joy to children learning to read. Seuss, who wrote his first children's book in 1937, was influenced significantly by a report published in "Life" magazine in 1954 that concluded that children were not learning to read because their books were boring.

On Monday at Bonita Springs Elementary School, first-grade students Emmie Weeks and Madison Owens, both 6, read a book at the opposite end of the spectrum.

"It was about a girl who was flying over the stars," said Madison, who took turns reading pages with Emmie, her best friend.

Emmie and Madison perched on a beanbag chair to read "Tar Beach," a story about a girl living in New York City who uses her family's evenings on their building's tar paper roof to imagine flying through the city and over the George Washington Bridge.

"‘I can fly,'" Madison read. "‘That means I'm free to go wherever I want for the rest of my life.'"

Emmie explains what she enjoys about reading: "Sometimes, when you read a book, you feel like you're doing (what the characters are.)"

And then there's the challenge.

"The big words — I can sound them out," Emmie said.

She is great at it too, helping Madison when she gets stuck on "floodlights" and "girders."

Florida Gulf Coast University intern Cassandra Siwarski worked with the children in teacher Bev Laney's first grade class, using Read Across America day to engage the group of advanced readers in a deeper exploration of literature. Each pair of students read a book about a different culture or ethnicity: African, Japanese and Native-American figuring prominently in their studies. Afterwards, students rotated among stations, writing their own books and researching their subjects on a computerized encyclopedia.

"The good thing about reading is it plays across all subject areas: math, science, social studies," said Siwarski. "This is a higher-level reading group for first grade. They've got the basics — the question is ‘how can I extend that?'"

For Madison and Emmie, that extension came when Siwarski asked them to write their own books.

"We're going to write about a girl ..." Madison said.

"... Who goes to Paris," Emmie added.

"And maybe the girl who goes to Paris has green hair," said Madison. "Because I'm thinking of another book, named ‘Green Eggs and Ham.'"